ServiceNow has been in use by Warwick since 2010 and the university said that it is very happy with the application. The problem was that, having a limited number of IT staff, the growth in scope and popularity of the system was starting to create challenges.

Growing pains

Since installing ServiceNow to deliver Incident and problem management services to staff and students, the university’s IT department has supplemented this core with Service Catalogue, Request, CMDB, and Change Management modules. It has also increased the use of the self-service capabilities.

The problem appeared to be that with the growth and greater use of ServiceNow came maintenance issues as reported and detected bugs and issues logged by the system were building up and stretching the IT services team.

Shane Parsons, service owner for service management for IT at Warwick University, commented, “We realised that in order to keep ServiceNow operating at peak performance we needed to make a number of changes but lacked the specialist expertise to support our in-house developer. We therefore turned to TeamUltra’s TeamAssist ServiceNow support package. TeamUltra have an excellent reputation as ServiceNow experts and quickly made an impact on our business, helping us not just overcome our challenges but also develop and extend how we use ServiceNow.”

One area where TeamUltra has helped is in the design of a process to manage new PC hardware requests. This involved building a front-end for user interaction which employs an automated workflow. The resulting user interface, which is due to be implemented, will enable users to diagnose whether their existing hardware needs replacing or if there is a cheaper alternative, such as upgrading a component or booking a service engineer.

Mike Beale, managing director of TeamUltra, added, “Maintaining the peak performance of ServiceNow can be a challenge for many IT departments. It is one of the major reasons that we see strong interest in our TeamAssist service which enables organisations to supplement their internal resources to tackle one off ServiceNow projects, leverage new areas of functionality within ServiceNow such as custom apps, or review how to continually improve the delivery of IT service management to end-users.”